i will extol the lord at all times, but especially when he gives me the energy to work 10 hours straight until 4:30 in the morning and wakes me up three horus later and carries me through a presentation in front of my peers and gives me a weekend to relax afterwards.

the legendary dreaded nightmare of el ed is now just a memory of the past.

rock and roll.

i had heard bits and pieces of this song in the past, while flipping through the radio, and although i knew it was a redneck way of supporting the war, i didnt know much more than that. i was hoping to include it in my rock and roll unit (as one of many views in music about war) but after reading the lyrics i am so sick to my stomach that i dont want it anywhere remotely near a future classroom of mine. what in the world would possess a man to write lyrics like that. i've heard he's written worse, too...i don't even want to know.

he was, he was in the churchyard
my father was in the first part
he came, he came to my bedroom
but i was asleep
and he woke me up again to say
"hallelujah! holy is the sound!'
i hope, i hope you are tired out
i know, i know there is joy, doubt
and i was asleep
and he woke me up again
and he woke me up again to say
"hold on to your old ways
or put off, put off every old face."
i know, i know you are changed out
and i hope, i hope you're arranged out
and i'm still asleep,
and you woke me up again,
and i'm still asleep,
and you woke me up to be holy
(-sufjan)

the hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. the night is nearly over; the day is almost here. so let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. clothe yourselves with the lord jesus christ.
(-paul)

- if you don't want to read all this, the last little "-" is the most important, so read that.
- as you may have read elsewhere, erica showed up saturday morning to surprise me and boy was i surprised. it was a quick visit but it was just what i needed and we enjoyed our time together. it was pretty great.
- the unit is coming along...29 lessons down, 21 to go. look for the rocking and rolling bulletin board in the hallway of reade over the next few days. if things go as planned, it's gonna look niiiiiiice.
- we visited fort wayne today and i showed erica the j-term stomping grounds. i really miss it up there. i wouldnt really want to go to taylor fort wayne, but the setting is sooo great and i wish i was there. apparently spring has hit ft wayne faster than upland, because lots of people's grass was really super high and some people were mowing it and it looked like a pretty big mess to mow with it being so high. it's a beautiful time of year, though, with the trees blooming and the grass green and growing and the parks in ft wayne are beautiful with lots of flowery blooming trees that smell good and even thought it's the city you can tell it's spring time and it looked really nice. was that a run-on sentence?
- we stopped by the jumping bean tonight to get erica and erin some caffeine before they left for home. i must say, although the drink was good, i'm not impressed with the new management. the tall cups are a bit skimpy (or maybe it's just the cheap cups that make them look skimpy and generally unimpressive), and if im not mistaken, the prices are up. if luke abernathy is reading this, i'll be a little embarrassed. i promise the drink was delicious but i'm a cheapskate and want a little bit more for a little bit less. that's all. anyway, i drank a mocha frappe and now i'm still wide awake. it has allowed me to get a bit done on my unit, but really must get some sleep more than anything to start off this week.
- erica and i had some good talk with neville about youth conference and whatnot. he was frustrated with the weekend's speaker, and with typical youth conference type speakers in general, and i wholeheartedly agree.
high school is no doubt a critical time but perhaps youth ministers get a little overzealous about protecting their kids or something...i'm sure they mean well but it turns into a step-by-step rule-by-rule formula of not drinking, not smoking, not having sex, and not even thinking about testing the limits in any one of those high-school-poster-sins. and we have these big conferences that turn into guilt-fests telling high schoolers that if they want to grow closer to god and be "on fire" for him they have to do this and this and this and not do this or this or this. they are convicted at the sessions, as it is so easy to do, they make some commitments that they naively think they can keep, and when they return home and mess up they feel all the more guilty and wonder where they went wrong and get so frustrated because they can't keep the fire lit.
the other thing is how formulaic these conferences get in a similar sense. the first night is a bunch of funny stories to get their attention. the next morning you ease them into the topics. saturday night you "really hit them hard" and you meet with the leaders to let them know what's gonna happen and how to handle it. it's really gonna change lives. then sunday morning is the somber "last-night-wore-me-out-so-where-do-we-go-from-here-and-how-do-we-keep-the-fire-burning?" morning.
please hear me when i say im sure these leaders and ministers have the best of intentions and praise god for it...BUT
where is the grace in all of this? arent we preaching the wrong message? neville thought it was ironic that the speaker closed one of his talks (about all the rules to follow) by saying "it's not about rules it's about a relationship" which pretty much contradicted what he was saying. we also mentioned how most teenagers say they dont want to get involved in christianity because it's just a bunch of rules. how telling.
and i know i went through this. boy did i ever. and i thought i knew what was going on but i soooo didnt. and i read the raggamuffin gospel freshman year, god was trying to wake me up to his grace, and i wasnt even ready for it then cuz this was so ingrained in my thinking...i rejected manning's book thinking "this guy is a little too liberal for me...what about following god's rules? sure, there's grace, but that doesnt mean you can do whatever you want...." i wasnt getting it...what it really meant. finally when i read the book again (last summer?) my life was changed and i finally understood what i was missing.
so why do we approach it like this?
are younger christians not ready to handle these truths? can they not think about these topics yet? the young kids need to learn the stories and how to be good little boys and girls and they can lean on their parents' faith in the process. the teenagers start establishing their own faith but they need to learn about following rules so they dont mess up their lives. then when you get to college you can start thinking about things and finding out the truths behind it all.
if we MUST preach the formulaic rules, can we at least give the teenagers reasoning behind the rules? "because the bible says so" is a start...but why not explain it so that it makes sense? so that teenagers realize the damage in some cases and DON'T want to do it. surely there is more reasoning behind god's law than the mere words on the pages. can we explain it? let them think?
i feel like we give our culture to much credit...we are underrating the abilities of our teenagers...we assume our culture has given them low attention spans and finite minds and we can only communicate through crazy games and funny stories and fast paced watered down messages and we have to lay things out black and white for them. im not sure if that's true.
teenagers can be smart kids. even if they arent being challenged to think in school or by the culture, why not challenge them to think in the church? but surely they are smarter than what we give them credit for...why not present things to them intelligently...let them wrestle with things a bit?
i just feel like things would radically change if we taught grace from the beginning. isn't that's how it's supposed to be?

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-- to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.
In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory. " eph1

YES! YESYESYES! THIS IS WHO YOU ARE IN HIM! yes, you ARE a failure who cannot resist temptation, but that is not what he sees you as! and if anything makes you want to not drink, smoke, or have sex, it is THIS!

whew. sorry. thanks.

this makes me want to be a youth pastor.

i think i may have sounded like a pretty big idiot on those previous entries...please disregard.

...maybe it's not so much of a pride thing as it is the fact that we've been so deeply conditioned by our culture...our churches and our families and more...it goes against everything we've ever been taught and that just makes it hard to swallow. not hard to swallow as in hard to believe, just difficult to accept and put into practice. i dont know.
some of us had lunch with mr. stackhouse today and it was pretty great. he had some good things to say about a variety of topics and that was pleasant.
read the taylor blog for the bad news.

john stackhouse is a very smart man who has been here the past few days speaking on feminism/egalitarianism.
i have absolutely no idea where i stand, so that's not what this post will be about.
it is such a heated topic filled with pride...men are so prideful they are unwilling to listen and even give it some thought, and i admit i fall into this camp many times. women are so prideful they are unwilling to accept anything less...and probably rightly so. and unfortunately, the majority of taylor students chose to miss out (physically but moreso mentally) on stackhouse's lectures...when a topic that wants to be dismissed is made easy to dismiss it will most definitely be dismissed. unfortunately, stackhouse made the topic easy to dismiss in his less-than-stellar display of public speaking, and a logic that could've been understood with some careful discipline, but easily went over your head if not prepared. so, the majority of students dismissed it and im not sure if it did any good...at least, any good in the minds of people it needed to do good in.
im not sure what the purpose of this entry is. i guess i'm just burdened with the enormous amount of pride that comes along with both sides, and the enormous breakthrough that must happen in the minds of men in order for them to back down and accept what is being presented. that's something women need to be a tiny bit more understanding of.
i do appreciate, though, that it was a man speaking on feminism. the world needs more men speaking out on feminism, more whites speaking out on racism, etc. that's the first step in making those breakthroughs...the people on the positive side of things who have nothing to really gain (except the fruitfulness to come later) speaking to those also on the positive side of things on the behalf of those on the negative side of things. not sure where i was going with that, but you know what i mean. maybe. whatever.
this was meant to be a little more intellectual than it's turning out to be. sorry for the scatter-brained mess.
have a good day.

tornado warning today, but no tornado. spent an hour in the basement for nothing. nothing exciting ever happens around here.
my computer decided to give me a scare and make believe it threw away over an hour's worth of work on my thematic unit. but i restarted it and it gave all the work back. whew.
15 lessons down, 35 lessons to go.

whoops...
so everyone knows that when you pick up the phone, say hello, and there's no answer, and then you hear the other side pick up after you say hello, it's a telemarketer, right?
well, i know that, anyway...and whenever it happens i immediately put on my annoyed attitude and start treating the other end pretty poorly.
so the phone rings.
i turn down my music a little bit.
i answer the phone with a "hello?"
and i hear the little delayed pick up noise...
so i don't say hello again...i just wait and make that dirty little telemarketer really uncomfortable, not knowing if there's someone on the other end or not.
well, after probably 30 seconds or so of my music playing in the background, and a little bit of typing what i was working on at the moment, i finally hear a "hello?"
and i recognize the voice.
it's kyle's dad.
boy was that ever awkward.

uggghhhh...not a good start to these 2 weeks.